The infusion of voice-based technology into consumer products, and the ways in which brands are shifting from social media to social messaging strategies were the subject I addressed with Epsilon Chief Digital Officer Tom Edwards, during a recent interview. Edwards told me how “disruption is the new normal” and how chatbots are the next thing chief marketing officers will have to deal with as technologies keep evolving.

I recently attended Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco and the event did not disappoint. Mark and the Facebook team outlined their approach to a ten year roadmap, launched the highly anticipated Messenger chat bot beta and showcased their first concepts of a social virtual reality experience.

The presentation below covers:

• The 10 year roadmap analysis

• The Rise of Chat bots

• Immersive Experiences & Social VR

The 10 year Roadmap

This was the 10 year roadmap presented at F8. It follows the lifecycle continuum approach outlined in the previous slide.

Facebook proper is the most mature and has a thriving 3rd party ecosystem as well as a sustainable monetization model.

Messenger has been identified as the next ecosystem with powerful tools that were released at F8 2016 to drive conversational commerce and a new approach to replacing apps..

VR, Connectivity and AI represent the near future for Facebook and Social VR will be a key area to watch. Developing strategies that capitalize on creating value today while experimenting for the future is key.

For analysis on Facebook’s 10 year roadmap including Facebook’s approach to product lifecycle, Facebook proper, the Live video API, approach to connectivity, artificial intelligence and Facebook’s investment in hardware and open platforms view slides 4-12 in the embedded slideshare.

The Rise of Chatbots

With 900M users and over 1 billion messages sent per month, Facebook felt that Messenger has progressed through their continuum approach to product lifecycle and now has hit the inflection point of scale to build out an ecosystem to solidify and sustain Messenger as the go to mobile application.

The key is that Messenger will support one bot to many pages. This makes it easy to seamlessly connect brands or services in a portfolio to create compelling and unique experiences that are 1:1.

Since Facebook does not own the mobile hardware or the operating system, they are positioning Messenger threads as a replacement for native apps.

In addition to this POV our Epsilon agency team wrote a comprehensive eBook that launched when Facebook announced the Messenger Beta. The ebook covers the shift from social media to messaging and the role data, chat bots and conversational commerce will play for brands.

Virtual & Augmented Reality

Facebook states that virtual reality is the next evolution of computing and is heavily invested in the hardware and experiences that will comprise aligning technology with presence.

During F8 Facebook outlined a path forward for active VR experiences, demonstrated social VR concepts for the first time publicly and identified augmented reality as a viable disruptor for the first time as to date all the conversation has been about VR experiences.

Virtual Reality experiences are coming and the key will be empowering consumers to create their own immersive experiences. Facebook’s long term goal is to create completely virtual experiences that recreate the physical world. For now wave 1 will be avatar based.

For in-depth analysis of virtual reality including an overview of the role of the Gear VR in the ecosystem, Oculus Touch, the first public demo of Facebook’s Social VR concepts and the bets of the future review slides 23-29 of the embedded slideshare.

Today at F8, Facebook made the formal announcement to beta launch 3rd Party Chat bot support for Facebook Messenger. I have written a few articles on this topic and have consolidated the thinking into an eBook.

Social media—and now social messaging—is a path to understanding and being in a relationship with your customers. Social messaging is poised to become the most direct, direct marketing channel, creating immediate 1:1 conversations with customers.

As consumer behavior shifts toward more intimate forms of communication and away from public sharing, we’re seeing social messaging apps become more popular than networking apps. Social messaging apps are the new lifestyle platforms, where consumers can do everything from booking a vacation or ordering food to checking traffic giving rise to a new form of commerce.

This white paper provides a deep-dive into:

1) Shifting consumer behaviors towards social messaging,

2) The potential impact of these changes driven by chatbots and conversational commerce

I am a believer that chatbots are a key element in the creation of conversational user experiences and will become core to the messaging experience. Chatbots will introduce new interaction models with new rules of engagement and capabilities that will flow seamlessly based on user interactions vs. installing and swapping between multiple apps.

A messenger chatbot ecosystem could rival and ultimately replace traditional app marketplaces and conversational chatbots, be it artificial intelligence or a bot augmented by humans will become the new standard for content delivery, experiences and transactions.

We view messaging apps as the new brand portal, conversational user experiences are the new interface and chatbots are the new apps. What makes this approach unique is it’s permission based, contextually relevant, immediate and native to mobile.

How can brands use chatbots to enhance their ecommerce?

Conversational commerce will be a key value proposition from messaging platforms. Our Epsilon research shows that messaging significantly impacts purchasing behaviors. Notably, consumers take photos, screenshots, and conduct video chats in real time to seek out assistance during their shopping process.

Brands can build bots with topical response decision trees that align with creating seamless paths to products and services. An example is how Sephora recently partnered with Kik to create a bot driven experience that led a customer through a personalized journey that ends with conversion directly within the conversation.

With Facebook’s upcoming launch of 3rd party chatbot support, they are empowering chatbot developers with tools to create structured messages that include images, descriptions, call-to-action and URL’s to connect conversation to commerce.

The key for brands to understand is that for now Chatbots are domain specific vs. general intelligence. This means that there is an opportunity to capture data upfront to establish a frictionless and personalized experience for consumers.

On March 17th Facebook rolled out a simple update to Messenger just in time for March Madness.

By simply using the basketball emoji in Messenger a user can play a simple swipe and shoot mini game directly within the Messenger app experience.

This very simple integration could very well show the future for how brand marketers can capitalize on activating within the messenger ecosystem. This along with the potential rise of 3rd party chat bots could fundamentally change how we interact with our mobile devices, social media & apps moving forward.

Facebook Messenger has over 800 million users. And in January of this year Social Messaging Apps such as Facebook Messenger passed Social Networks for the first time when it comes to active users.

The basketball emoji example shows how a brand can potentially activate in a contextual way through a conversational UI and activate emoji, stickers and other experiences directly within the messenger experience.

As of today, 43.7 million players worldwide have played the Basketball Messenger mini-game. It hit the 300 million sessions mark just a week after launch, and the game took place in 61 million different conversations on Messenger.

Facebook would join Telegram as the only two Messenger providers that support open 3rd party apps 100%. You can see examples of bot integrations in action as Uber & Lyft are already integrated with Messenger.

This move by Facebook would provide scale and a massive audience and I am seeing additional enhancements being made prior to F8 such as the testing of in-line bots before the release of an SDK. This is similar to Telegram & Kik and allows users to connect directly with existing bots.

A Messenger Chat Bot ecosystem could rival and ultimately replace app marketplaces. Conversational chat bots + AI through messaging could become the new standard for content delivery, experiences and transactions.

Building on the models we have seen in Asia with WeChat and Line, brand marketers will need to rethink the role their brands play to enable conversations, entertainment and convenience through bots vs. how they engage today through social and other channels.

Going back to the Basketball example, this means that brands could theoretically own the activation of unicode emoji as well as custom stickers and experiences. There is also a stickiness to the experience as high scores and other messages are shared between both parties.

Bots can also reduce the need for whole mobile apps for multiple phone operating systems, offering lower operational costs. Chat will quickly become the mobile portal, just like Google dominates Desktop search, Facebook is looking to dominate Messaging on mobile.

We cannot ignore the shift of consumers to more intimate means of sharing as well as the potential of comprehensive messenger based ecosystem that can allow the delivery of information, rich media, location services, e-commerce and traditional commerce.

I will be on the ground at F8 and will bring live coverage of all of the details if and when Facebook formally announces their 3rd Party Chat Bot SDK.

Over the years I have built and defined go-to-market strategies for a number of native applications. I enjoy a clean user experience and I am always on the look out for new and compelling ways to connect with consumers.

With that said I am incredibly impressed by the launch of Quartz’s Native IOS app. Instead of an endless stream of news headlines their approach is to simplify the news experience into an emoji driven, text/messaging like conversation that gives the user the illusion that they are in control of the content experience.

There are three aspects of the experience that I find unique. Below are points to consider that could have application for brand marketers who create heavily content centric experiences.

Conversational Flow – The simplicity and familiarity of the experience makes it very appealing. The user experience (UX) is framed just like a traditional text/messaging conversation.

This immediately provides a feeling of intimacy vs. being presented with a sea of information to wade through. The use of emoji and animated gifs also gives it more of a conversational messenger feel vs. a traditional news/content experience.

User-Controlled Experience – The other aspect of the UX that I really like is the ability to self select the direction of the experience. I have the option to click the emoji driven option that opens the article within the native app or continue down the path of the next article.

This semblance of control is important as psychologically being in an environment that feels safe and gives me the illusion of control is key to gaining attention and deliberate focus to the topics at hand.

The integration into notifications as a driver for ongoing engagement is key as well. Knowing the experience is more conversational vs. disruptive can potentially lead to longer term engagement.

Conversational Advertising – From a marketing and advertising perspective the format is very interesting. Each story is tied to a user action and a preference signal is given. Over time it could be possible to build a robust progressive profile based on interactions that can lead to a truly personalized experience.

Out of the gate I do not see the Quartz app taking this approach, but that would be a natural next step to continue to refine the offering and potentially have it powered by an AI based system that can quickly parse the data into personalized streams and map “conversational advertising” into the experience.

What I did like about the ad serving within the experience is that it was not disruptive. Once I had completed reviewing the curated selection of content I was then rewarded with an animated gif that again reinforces the conversational aspect and then given a simple advertising message about the app being brought to me by the new MINI Clubman.

Even though this is a form of native advertising, I am going to call it conversational advertising as we are in the midst of a massive shift from social media to social messaging where consumers are looking for intimate, conversational experiences that are focused on empowering, enabling and enhancing their mobile/digial/social experiences.

Kudos to the Quartz team for delivering a highly conversational approach to information overload and understanding the importance of empowering the consumer.

BlackFin360 Archives

Tom Edwards, Ad Age Marketing Technology Trailblazer and Chief Digital Officer, Agency @ Epsilon analyzes best practices and points of difference between Google Actions across the Google Assistant ecosystem as well as Amazon Alexa Voice Services.

In this video, Tom compares and contrasts Amazon Alexa Skills with Google Actions and discusses feature differences, outlines best practices associated with deploying skills and actions as well as key points to consider before submitting for final approvals.

Tom also discusses driving skill and action discovery as well as strategic thoughts tied to going beyond tactical utility towards full ecosystem considerations.

In this video, Tom analyzes the new features that are available as well as discusses topics such as the shift towards social messaging, the role of YouTube’s Uptime application and a preview towards the world of immersive co-viewing with YouTube in virtual reality.